Outline

Some time ago, I improvised drafts of this book online, in every-other-week installments. I started on this twice. The improvisations needed major rethinking to become a book, but there's lots of good stuff in them. Here they are:

September 25, 2006

Book 2.0Episode 11: Romantic Classicism

In
episode 10:

Our
present troubles are part of a long-term -- very long-term -- trend. How did this
develop? At one time, the concept of classical music didn't even exist. People
we now think of as great composers -- Haydn, Mozart, Handel, Bach -- were composing
music we now call classical, but nobody called it that then, and hardly anybody
thought it should be listened to in sober, reverent silence. Music was a lively
art. Almost all the pieces played were new. They often featured dance rhythms
(think of Bach) and lusty, folk-like melodies (think Haydn). The audience
talked during performances, and reacted loudly to the music, clapping and
cheering when they heard something they liked. And the musicians often
improvised, to an extent we can barely imagine today.

I'm
not going to claim that this was any kind of golden age. Performances, by our
standards now, were hardly rehearsed at all, and the noise from the audience
might have been hard for us to take. And the hardest thing to understand would
be how pieces that we now consider masterworks were written to be played for an
audience that often didn't listen! But for me, the age of Bach, Handel, Haydn,
Mozart, and even Beethoven, was the time when the music we now call classical
hadn't yet begun to stiffen, when it was written directly for an audience, when
the reaction of that audience deeply mattered, when the audience and the
musicians, too, played a part in musical creativity -- and when even so,
composers could write arresting, exciting, path-breaking music. In at least one
way, I'd compare it to pop music in our time. Music wasn't held to the
forbidding standard supposedly set by the pantheon of the greats. It functioned
as part of the world it was written and performed in, and people embraced it --
even when they felt it transfigured them -- as part of their everyday lives.

So
how did things change? Three things happened. At the start of the 19th century,
the idea of classical music began to emerge -- the idea that some of the music
from the past had transcendent value, that this music stood apart from mere
entertainment, and had to be heard with unbroken attention; that the composers
who wrote it were all but godlike figures; that their music had to be played
exactly as they wrote it; and that of course they set the standard for all the
music that came after them. Classical music now stood apart from ordinary life,
and as the 19th century progressed, more and more of the music that everyone
performed came from the past.

And
then, near the start of the 20th century, came the rise of modernism. Modernist
music sounded harsh; it avoided (or much of it did) steady rhythms and
understandable melodies. So now the new music with the highest critical
prestige stood apart both from everyday life and from the masterworks of the
classical mainstream. Which of course focused classical music even more on the
past (an uncomfortable paradox, since modernism saw itself as a leap toward the
future).

And
then came the final blow, the rise of popular culture, and above all rise of
popular music -- jazz and rock -- that in many ways wasn't created on western
models. Now it was even harder for classical music to reflect contemporary
life, since now the world expressed itself in music that wasn't even remotely
classical. Classical music now was even more boxed into its little corner.
Worse yet, jazz and rock evolved their own kinds of art music. So now people
who want new musical art don't have to care about classical music at all. We
shouldn't be surprised, then, that classical music is losing ground. First it
insulates itself from the outside world (in all the ways that I've described),
and then the outside world returns the compliment, and gets interested in other
things.

Let's
now look a little bit at each of these developments, starting with the
emergence of classical music, as both a concept and a practice. We can begin
with a vignette from musical history. "In October [of 1895]," writes
Jan Swafford, in his deep, engaging biography of Brahms, "Brahms went to
Zürich to conduct [his] Triumphliedfor
the inauguration of the new Tonhalle [which still is
Zurich's leading concert hall today]. Looking up at the paintings on the
ceiling, he saw portraits of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and himself."

This
isn't an experience that Beethoven, Bach, or Mozart could have had. But when
Brahms was a student, in the early 1840s, the pantheon existed. For composers,
this brought an enormous sense of responsibility. And when Brahms became
conductor of the GesellschaftderMusikfreunde (The Society of Friends of Music), one
of Vienna's
leading musical performing groups, he mostly played old music, works from that
weighty pantheon.

What
else happened when the concept of classical music evolved?

***

Many things had to change before music could become
classical. First, music had to seem important. And, strange as this might seem
to us, before the late 18th century, no matter how much people liked music -- no
matter how often they flocked to the opera, no matter how much they wanted
music in church -- music, as an art, was considered more or less trivial, patronized
by the great philosopher Immanuel Kant as nothing much more than a "play of
pleasant sounds." Dr. Charles Burney, remembered even
now for his pioneering history of music, first published in 1776, and for books
describing his musical travels through 18th century Europe,
called music "an innocent luxury."

But by 1796, something new was in the air. In a book with
the fabulous title Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk, Wilhelm
Heinrich Wackenroder (an ecstatic German who died
while he was still in his 20s), gushed that music "represents human emotions in
a super-human manner." That made it the "most wondrous" of arts, nothing less,
in fact, than the "language of angels." People took this seriously. All sorts
of new ideas and new emotions were circulating. Anyone who's studied history
knows at least the Cliff Notes version of this, which is all I'm going to try
to give here. The American and French revolutions told the western world that
societies could change. And societies had in fact been changing for quite a
while, thanks to the emergence of what we now recognize as modern economic
life. People traveled more, bought more, sold more, had
access to more things to eat, read, look at, and do. So the
idea of the individual started to grow -- the idea of an individual who could
make his own (or, later on, even her own) life, distinct from society,
responsive to nothing (or so the myth went) but personal needs.

This, of course, was a romantic idea, and what emerged all
around it (as well as inside it, right at its core) was the complex of ideas
and feelings we now call romanticism. People in the grip of romanticism were
consumed by longing -- longing for love, or, even more powerfully, longing for
something transcendent and infinite. Sometimes all this was more than a little
vague, and that (at least in retrospect) doesn't seem surprising, since as
society changed -- growing more uncertain, and also growing both uglier (as
factories were built) and less cultured (as the middle class grew, with money
to spend, but crass and undeveloped taste) -- what romantics wanted was both an
escape, and something (even something intangible, or maybe especially something
intangible) to hang onto.

Art became central to their quest. And music seemed like the
highest of the arts, precisely because it seemed the most abstract, the least
tied to reality. In the 18th century, that had been a problem. This was precisely
why music wasn't so highly valued; because it was abstract, it couldn't express
any thoughts (or so people thought), unless it had words attached. But now, as
the 19th century unfolded, music was "the art which casts off the corporeal";
it was, as Mark Evan Bonds writes in his book Music as Thought (a study of exactly this era) the "highest of all
arts" because (as people then thought) it lets us "perceive the Absolute."

And that, as Bonds writes, meant that instrumental music now
seemed more vital than vocal music, exactly because its meaning couldn't be
fixed. And the symphony -- happily thought of as light entertainment during much
of the 18th century -- now seemed like the most profound kind of instrumental
music, because it avoided virtuosity; because symphonic composers used
sophisticated compositional techniques; because symphonies, thanks to their
deep musical coherence, and because they united contrasting elements into a
single whole, expressed the deepest truths; and because the many musical
instruments that made up an orchestra -- with their cooperative interplay --
evoked an image of an ideal society.

You can see where this is going. If music was this
important, so very central to everything that mattered most in life, than of
course it had to be heard in perfect, reverent silence. And of course the music
of the past had to be preserved, because -- to people living in the early 19th
century -- it was music of the past, the 18th century music of Haydn and Mozart,
that first had shown (and in the living memory of people who'd heard it when
those composers still were alive) what the full, complex power of instrumental music
could be.

There was more. Cultured aristocrats and people in the
professional classes wanted to preserve what they saw as high culture against
the onslaught, as they thought, of middle-class vulgarity. German nationalism
played a part; Haydn and Mozart had been German, and many Germans -- with the
German nation politically divided -- looked for unifying symbols of German
culture. (Note, by the way, that the distinction we make in our time between Germany and Austria didn't exist back then. In
the 19th century, Austria
was just one of the many German states.)

And then there was Beethoven, whose life straddled the era
we're talking about; he was born in 1770 and shook the high-culture musical
world until his death in 1827. If he hadn't existed, someone -- or so we might
fantasize -- would have had to invent him, because there couldn't have been a
more perfect embodiment of all the new romantic musical ideals. He was the
first composer who cut himself loose, just about completely, from the ways that
18th century composers made their livings, through employment, patronage, or,
sometimes, as musical entrepreneurs. He was the first composer to stand apart
from society, to define himself purely as an artist, even to say, in so many
words, that he was writing music for the ages.

His music was informed by great ideals, and in fact by the
new romantic ideals of freedom and personal transcendence, which he maintained
in the face of threats to liberty that came from Napoleon, and from the
repressive Austrian state in which Beethoven lived. His music seethed with
struggle. His compositions (and especially his symphonies) weren't friendly,
like Haydn's, or effortless, like Mozart's (or at least this was the way the
19th century saw Haydn and Mozart). Instead, in many of his major works,
Beethoven fought his way from trouble to triumph. For his romantic listeners,
he wasn't just emotional; he inspired awe, to a degree that could almost be
frightening:

Thus Beethoven's instrumental music also opens up to us the
realm of the monstrous and immeasurable. Burning rays of light shoot through
the deep night of this realm, and we become aware of giant shadows that surge
back and forth, closing in on us in ever-narrower confines until they destroy
us, but not the pain of endless longing.

That was the great romantic E. T. A. Hoffman, evoking Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony in 1808. Even as late as 1880, more than 30% of the music played
by one of Vienna's
leading orchestras was by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven.

But how did this impetuous romantic classicism come to
dominate musical performance? Not easily, because at first -- as the 19th
century dawned -- the music that now was called "classical" had to fight a much
stronger wave of impetuous new popular music. And it comes as a shock today to
learn that this popular music was written by composers we now think of as
classical -- Liszt, for instance (who first became known as a wildly popular, hypnotic
piano virtuoso), or Rossini.

In
the next episode: classical vs. popular music in the 19th century. Including
the British classical music society so stuffy it wouldn't play Haydn -- because,
they thought, he was too witty to be serious.

"Formerly if [a musician] wrote a claptrap string quartet to be played
by the fiddlers of the Duke of Plaza-Tora, that still
left him glowing with the tinge of the duke's greatness. But to write claptrap
polkas or romances for a welter of nameless grocers' daughters -- that was
somehow humiliating." (Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos)

cultured aristocrats, people in the
professional classes: William Weber, Music
and the Middle Class. New York:
Holmes & Meyer Publishers, 1975; passim

German nationalism: Bonds, op. cit., pp. 79ff

Hoffman on Beethoven: Hoffman's review of Beethoven's Fifth
is one of the key texts documenting Beethoven's reception in the early 19th
century. Quoted in Bonds, op. cit., p. 35

30% by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: Leon Botstein: "Vienna," §5 (ii), Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy
(accessed 9/24/06), http://www.grovemusic.com. For the increasing percentages
of old music on concert programs as the 19th century progressed, see also
William Weber, "Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste,
1770-1870." International
Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 8, No. 1.
(June, 1977), p. 18

***

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Posted by gsandow on September 25, 2006 12:30 AM

COMMENTS

Yesterday I took my 10-year-old to his cello class, where the young cellists played the pieces they have been working on. It was inspiring to be in a room full of parents and children (these are ordinary kids, not prodigies) who devote energy to learning music.
The pieces were beautiful, all European, all composed by dead people. In my own early training as a musician this was true, too: all of the music in lesson books was European, except for the occasional American folk song like "Red River Valley."

Music students and their teachers don't have time to think about this; they're busy learning to play. But I'm sure that the romantic ideas you're bringing up are part of the reason no one notices anything odd about the lesson repertoire. Young musicians get completely used to the idea that their music is not connected with anything local or current, and some of them become teachers who continue on in the same way. As you say, it can come to be seen as a good thing to be involved with something set apart from current reality.

But things were different at CalArts, where as an undergraduate I was immersed in music written by composers who were right there (much of it reflecting jazz and rock and folk influences, and some of it still making a virtue of its own unpopularity) and lots of music from non-Western traditions (the faculty still includes Ghanaian, Indonesian, and Indian musicians). This variety completely blew my mind, and my understanding of what the word "music" includes has never been the same.

Claims that one style is more valuable than another no longer make sense to me, even though I happen to make most of my living playing canonical works by those dead European guys. I'm constantly surprised at the stodgy behavior of classical music organizations, and your book goes a long way toward explaining it.

Speaking of attitudes towards dead composers, Nigel Kennedy the violinist had some interesting things to say in today's Guardian about it, 'this country' being a reference to the UK (he has famously refused to perform with any London orchestras ever again):

You only have to spend a short time in Kennedy's company to realise that, for all his famed irreverence, he actually takes culture very seriously indeed. It's those who approach the arts in a falsely reverential fashion who are the real philistines, he claims. "The problem in this country is that we don't see classical music as part of our root culture. So we approach it in this ridiculously gentrified manner, and play the music in an uptight fashion completely alien to the blokes who wrote it. I mean, Beethoven and Mozart were two of the greatest geniuses who ever lived - but they also knew how to have a good time."

So it's the people in black tie and tails who are the real impostors? "Exactly. It's like pretending to be German and over 200 years old - you end up looking like a pillock."

Outline

Some time ago, I improvised drafts of this book online, in every-other-week installments. I started on this twice. The improvisations needed major rethinking to become a book, but there's lots of good stuff in them. Here they are: